“The prose of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is as obscure and convoluted as the monstrous house and monstrous people it describes; its paragraphs are as cluttered as a Victorian sitting room, full of dark furniture and unexpected impediments to progress.” Nice zeugma, that.
The thing that surprised me about Poe when I first learned about him properly was just how early or out of time he is - as you say here, in between the glory days of Romantic poetry and the hue and cry of Victorian fiction, and so much earlier than the Conan Doyle/Bram Stoker stories among which his work seemed (to me at least) to belong. For cultural historians, the 1830s and 40s are a kind of no man’s land: not the 1790s and not the 1850s. Which makes them all the more interesting.
Absolutely agree - and it's one of those things that make hi stand out so evidently - he's like one of those mountains in Guilin, rising surprisingly out of an other flat and undistinguished plain.
This is a fascinating read. I’ve never read Edgar Allan Poe and agree he was conspicuously absent from my schooling. The strange details of his life and death definitely make further investigation irresistible.
Looking forward to a few more creepy Halloween based pieces this month!
I did to him at Uni, I have to admit, where I read all his fiction and wrote a long essay about him (tho I remember nothing about it now), which should tell you keen I became. I think he’s worth reading if only to see where so much down stream of him comes from.
And when it comes to more Halloween content this month, if I was to say “O God! O Christ! No! For the love of god, think what you’re doing!”, would you take it as a refusal to do any, or as a clue as to the film we’re covering in ‘Can we show the kids?’ this month?
“The prose of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is as obscure and convoluted as the monstrous house and monstrous people it describes; its paragraphs are as cluttered as a Victorian sitting room, full of dark furniture and unexpected impediments to progress.” Nice zeugma, that.
The thing that surprised me about Poe when I first learned about him properly was just how early or out of time he is - as you say here, in between the glory days of Romantic poetry and the hue and cry of Victorian fiction, and so much earlier than the Conan Doyle/Bram Stoker stories among which his work seemed (to me at least) to belong. For cultural historians, the 1830s and 40s are a kind of no man’s land: not the 1790s and not the 1850s. Which makes them all the more interesting.
Absolutely agree - and it's one of those things that make hi stand out so evidently - he's like one of those mountains in Guilin, rising surprisingly out of an other flat and undistinguished plain.
This is a fascinating read. I’ve never read Edgar Allan Poe and agree he was conspicuously absent from my schooling. The strange details of his life and death definitely make further investigation irresistible.
Looking forward to a few more creepy Halloween based pieces this month!
I did to him at Uni, I have to admit, where I read all his fiction and wrote a long essay about him (tho I remember nothing about it now), which should tell you keen I became. I think he’s worth reading if only to see where so much down stream of him comes from.
And when it comes to more Halloween content this month, if I was to say “O God! O Christ! No! For the love of god, think what you’re doing!”, would you take it as a refusal to do any, or as a clue as to the film we’re covering in ‘Can we show the kids?’ this month?
Ooh, excellent! I actually only watched that for the first time this year. Interested to read your take.